


Heart

by SophiaCatherine



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: (two of 'em), 7x02 The Speed of Thought, Angry Barry Allen, Angst with a Happy Ending, Barry Allen has ADHD, Emotions, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Fix-It, Heartwarming, I'll just be over here still fixing ableist neurodivergent tropes in media, Iris West-Allen rescuing her damn badass self, Past Character Death, and replacing them with ND headcanons that actually make sense to me, don't mind me, something of a character study, westallen epilogue but otherwise background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-24 07:47:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30068970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SophiaCatherine/pseuds/SophiaCatherine
Summary: Barry’s feelings have always been too much.The Speed Force calls out to Barry. He answers.
Relationships: Barry Allen/Iris West
Comments: 18
Kudos: 28





	Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RetroactiveCon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RetroactiveCon/gifts), [blueelvewithwings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueelvewithwings/gifts).



> After 7x02, I needed a different story for my emotional speedster with so much heart. 
> 
> I tried to give Iris a bit of moment here, too. (But if you want a really great Iris-centric fix-it for the same episode, I recommend RetroactiveCon's powerful [Not Just A Reflection.)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29991408)

_If your mom thought for one second that you going back to save her would mean you losing what makes you so special, she would never want that._

* * *

The Hall of Fallen Heroes keeps calling Barry back.

He thought it was a good idea, when the team suggested it. Nora’s jacket shouldn’t be gathering dust alone in the time vault. Everyone they’ve lost should be together.

That was before he saw the room full of empty suits.

Memorials are supposed to be peaceful. The noise in Barry’s head has never roared so loud.

He’s been here for ten minutes, eyes fixed on Nora’s jacket. Arms linked behind his back. Feet planted. Still.

“Got bored of thinking fast?” says Joe’s voice, behind him.

Barry doesn’t turn around.

If he turns around, looks at Firestorm’s emblem, or Snart’s goggles or Jesse’s suit or _Nash’s bag_ , he’ll—

“Barr.”

He doesn’t move. “Frost got hurt.” 

There was almost one more suit in this macabre heroes’ parade. 

“Barr,” Joe repeats, a little more gently. He steps in beside Barry. “What’s going on?”

Barry stretches his neck out, feeling the click on each side. Iris used to rub his shoulders, after days like this. Dimming the lights, wrapping herself around Barry from behind, whispering that it was going to be okay. He would believe her, no matter what he'd done. Made the wrong choice. Trusted another liar. Let someone die. Poor Iris - it wasn’t fair to lean on her so hard. But she was the one person he could, even when he felt like Atlas.

Wrong myth. The world doesn’t weigh on Barry’s shoulders. It weighs on his heart.

“I just keep screwing up,” Barry murmurs. 

The empty suits sound a haunting echo. 

Joe’s hand is on his shoulder. “Thought I told you to stop that.”

Barry shrugs him off. “You want me not to feel?” What a surprise. “Great news, Joe. I can turn my feelings off, now.” 

“Don’t,” Joe says softly. 

There’s pain on his face, and for one terrible moment, Barry’s glad. A shock of regret stills him, a few seconds too late. “Sorry.” 

(The Artificial Speed Force purrs in Barry’s head. So quiet.)

His foster father sighs and wraps an arm around him, in a very Joe West hug. Keeping Barry just a little bit at arms length. Too much for Joe. 

Always _too much_ for everyone.

“I get it.” Joe breaks into the roar. “You’re in that mood where you want everyone else to feel as bad as you do.” His voice cracks. “I do. She’s my daughter.”

(Quiet.)

Barry turns away, back to this monument to all his deadliest mistakes. 

“I don’t know what to do,” he admits. 

Joe hums. “Speed-thinking, huh?” 

“It’s not the speed-thinking,” Barry says, half to himself. “It’s the quiet.” He catches Joe’s puzzled eye. “I can turn it all off. Focus on what matters.”

Barry’s been seeing that shrewd eyebrow raise since he was eleven. Whatever wisdom Joe’s about to unleash, he doesn’t want to hear it. 

“Is it worth it, if you lose your good heart, Barr?”

It clangs like a bell. Barry spins on his heel. “Anything's better than this!” He flings an arm around the room. “How many times do you want me to just stand back and let them play us like a chess board, Joe?” He fights to keep his eyes on Joe, but the Wells memorial catches his eye. “You need a reminder of everyone who took advantage of my _heart?_ Thawne. Zoloman. Savitar. DeVoe. Want any more? I got names for days.”

Mom. Dad. Nora. Ronnie. HR. All the Wellses.

...The Speed Force.

 _Your fault,_ whisper the ghosts.

Joe just nods slowly. “And for every Eobard Thawne, there’s a Frankie Kane.” Barry doesn’t want his patience, but he’s got it. Joe is the still center in the storm, and he deserves better than Barry. “I know you, Barry. You really wanna believe in people.” 

That was then.

“Trust yourself, son.”

Barry almost laughs out loud. He slept next to an imposter for months and couldn’t even feel that she wasn’t Iris. 

He’s standing among the tombs of his _trust._

“We have an advantage now,” Barry mutters. 

Joe points a very fatherly finger. “Enough, Barry. You’re a whole grown-up and you can make your own decisions, but don't pretend this is about tactical advantages, or whatever other lies you’re telling yourself. I think you miss Iris, and I think you’re tired of hurting.”

Barry can’t look at Joe’s sadness. “You got any other solutions, Joe?” He’s really trying not to yell, but the quiet is on the other side of a chasm in his mind. “Gonna lock me in the pipeline again?”

_Too much._

Joe always gets quieter when Barry gets louder. “We’ll talk when you’ve burned this out.” 

And he’s gone. 

(Quiet.)

Barry doesn’t think, and he sure as hell doesn’t feel.

He runs.

* * *

 _I_ _can save Mom._

_At what cost?_

* * *

For a long time, he doesn’t miss the sound of his feet on the ground. 

When the portal opens, he just keeps running. Straight into the Artificial Speed Force.

Step after silent step.

It would be a relief, if he could feel relief anymore.

And then he starts to hear it. Little by little, till it's all he can hear. 

_Nothing._

Barry’s Speed Force was warm and welcoming. _You’re home,_ it whispered in his heart and thrummed in his veins as he ran. Every step was alive with a song. _You’re ours, you’re ours, you’re ours._

This is hushed, like grief. 

Like standing still.

His feet fall soft on ashes. The lightning-scape around him has all but burned itself out. 

If Barry could care, he wouldn’t. He picks up the pace. 

He listens to the silence, and keeps running himself into the ground.

* * *

Barry’s feelings have always been _too much._

Seven. Playground taunts scrape sharp and bright in his chest, so much worse than any punch. Teachers say _Ignore them,_ and he's perplexed. 

Fourteen. He sits with Iris in the movie theater, watching her lit up by the mystical light of the screen, and he wishes for one moment of weakness that he didn’t love her so much. 

Sixteen. He sobs down the phone for an hour, across a glass chasm from his dad, and Barry can’t take another week without him. _You can,_ his dad says, and Barry hates him because he’s right. 

Twenty-seven. He’s doing dishes with Joe, weeks and weeks after Flashpoint, still trying to find words for the weight of it all. Joe sighs. _You just gotta let things go, Barr._

Barry is living evidence that feelings and thought are not incompatible. He’s got a brain. _You even use it sometimes,_ Joe says, the lines around his eyes crinkling into a smile. _Barry Allen,_ _youngest CSI assistant at CCPD, graduated summa cum laude two years early, and he cries at Jenna’s bedtime stories._

And at cheesy TV shows and ball games. And when they’re out of ice cream at the store. And at the scene in Star Wars where Han says _I know,_ and Iris throws a pillow at him and calls him _sappy_ and looks at him like she’d like to say a few _I knows_ herself.

And he laughs the loudest of anyone around the family dinner table, joy boundless as the ocean, that no monster could ever take from him. And he runs like he’s alive.

 _They’re good bedtime stories,_ he quips back at Joe. _You’re an artist._

When Joe tells Barry he brought a light into the West house, he’s not talking about Barry’s brain.

But, monster by monster, he's afraid the darkness is winning. 

His dad dies. (His friends lock him in the pipeline.)

Nora betrays them. (Iris's disappointed eyes. _That’s how you feel, Barry.)_

They lose Nora. (He tells Iris he’ll never get over it.)

He kills the Speed Force. 

Iris disappears into the mirror.

Behind it all, the monster the color of fear that he should have beaten long ago, and the faces of everyone he loves behind a glass barrier he can never break through.

_Too much._

No matter what he feels, Barry Allen is alone.

 _(Where are you?_ he sings out into the silence.)

* * *

It’s dark. 

Darkness and silence and ash under his feet.

If he stops, he’ll feel everything, and he’ll never get up again. He forces himself on, step after relentless step. 

Inevitability catches up with him. He stumbles. And sees something, on the distant horizon of a desolate landscape.

A cabin.

He skids to a halt in front of Henry Allen. And just… looks at him.

“It can’t be you,” Barry pants. (When was he last winded in the Speed Force?) 

Fact: his father is dead.

Fact: the Speed Force is dead, and its avatars with it.

Facts are what Barry deals in now. The impenetrable glass divider between him and the pain.

His dad is leaning in the open doorway of the cabin, looking at him with an unmistakable half-smile. Barry knows that expression - that mix of love, fond disappointment, and an enduring faith in his son that could outlast the heat death of the multiverse.

Barry’s chest starts to burn, and it _can’t,_ he’s not ready to let it all come rushing back, but... his dad. “It’s not you,” he whispers.

He knows how his father’s hand on his shoulder feels. 

He cries like he’s eleven years old, and his dad just wraps his arms around him, like there is no feeling too big or too terrible for the love of a father to hold.

* * *

_What if it changes you?_

_I don't care._

_I do._

* * *

His dad makes tea. 

It tastes like tea.

Barry stares into the fathomless, swirling dark, a world in a teacup. “How are you here?” He looks up at a smile he never thought he’d see again. It twists in a flash of grief inside him. This is not his father… and it is. And Barry’s only ever been one place where that’s true. “Are you the Speed Force?” 

His father smiles. “What do you think, Barry?”

The power of thought catches up with him. It’s not _possible._ “You can't be. I killed the Speed Force.” Oh, that wasn’t a feeling Barry ever needed to come rushing back. Like losing everyone he’s ever loved and lost, all over again.

He breathes slowly through it.

His father looks at him with such depths of compassion. Barry wonders how Henry didn’t lose that, in all the tragedy of his life. He wonders if it hurt. “Barry, are your mother and father with you?”

Barry doesn’t have to think. The answer is etched deep in all the furious excesses and secret corners of his heart. “Every day.” 

Henry slides a hand across the table. It’s warm, when it closes around Barry’s. “Then how can the Speed Force ever be gone, when you’re still here?” 

Barry swallows through something sharp and bittersweet waking up in him. He doesn’t want to feel it. 

His father’s eyes are shining with love that hurts to look at. “Do you believe the lightning chose you? That _we_ chose you?” 

Barry nods. The physics in his head is scraping against the faith in his soul. “I don’t have speed.” 

His father chuckles, nodding around a cabin sparking with irrepressible lightning. “Evidence would suggest otherwise.” 

Barry gazes out onto the dead landscape beyond the window. “We screwed up. The Artificial Speed Force doesn’t have a heart.”

Henry moves his hand up. It comes to rest over his son’s chest. “Doesn’t it?” he asks, so gently that Barry could cry.

Barry closes his eyes. 

He feels his father’s hand, warm on his chest.

He feels his own heart, beating fast as a miracle.

He _feels._

When he opens his eyes, and Henry reaches out to brush his son’s damp cheeks, his weary face has cracked with that half smile again. Uncontainable faith in Barry, bursting out of his father the same way joy and pain burst out of Barry. When Henry looks at him like that, Barry knows he can do this. His dad believes in him.

* * *

“Iris is stuck in the Mirrorverse.” He can’t shut down again - but he thinks about her lost out there, and he can’t breathe. It’s the one thing his heart can’t survive.

“We know.”

“I’m scared.”

The Speed Force looks at him with shining eyes. “Yes.” 

Barry gazes out onto the world he made, hopeless and buried in ash. “How do I get her out?”

“What does your heart tell you?”

There’s a song in Barry’s head. 

He turns away from the chaos, and looks up at the Speed Force avatar’s smile. It’s how Henry Allen used to smile at Nora Allen. Barry doesn’t dare breathe. But maybe he understands, at last. “I need to believe in her.”

“The way you always have.”

* * *

Barry can’t stay here forever. It’s too easy to slip away into the silence, even now. And Iris needs him.

(He needs her more.)

“We will be with you,” the Speed Force promises, when Barry pulls away from a hug that lasts an eternity. 

Barry looks down at his father’s hand on his chest. “I still don’t _understand.”_

“Don’t think too hard.” His dad’s eyes sparkle just like they used to, and Barry blinks back tears. “When you run, we’ll be there. All you have to do is listen. The rest? Just detail.” He takes a step back. “Run, Barry. Don’t ever stop.”

Barry only allows himself one glance back over his shoulder. His father has gone back to leaning in the doorway, that old, familiar look back on his face.

When Time finally catches up with Barry Allen, and they race like old rivals for a little while, until everything is stillness... Barry hopes that look on his dad's face is one of the last things he sees.

* * *

Joe gets an old familiar look of his own, when Barry says they'll find another way to get Iris out. Pride. It’s more than Barry deserves, but he’ll take it. 

Also, Joe manages not to say _I told you so,_ in a rare moment of restraint that has Barry throwing his arms around him.

He holds on a little longer than he probably should, but Joe doesn’t seem to mind.

Barry whispers that he’s sorry.

“I get it,” Joe whispers, like that was never a question.

Barry holds on.

“What?” Joe asks, when Barry finally lets him go.

“I love you,” Barry tells him, maybe more enthusiastically than he’s ever said it. “If I ever forget to tell you that— well. I won’t.”

Joe shakes his head, but he can’t hide his fond expression. “So many damn feelings.”

“Damn right,” Barry says proudly. “And you wouldn’t want it any other way.”

Joe chuckles, patting Barry’s back as he walks away. “It’s all about the humanity, Barr.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Barry grumbles after him. “My heart is my real superpower. Is anyone not stuck on that theme, this week?”

And the Flash suit catches his eye… and his father’s voice echoes across the years, through a glass divider that could never keep them apart.

_I am in awe of the remarkable man that you are becoming, all the things you've achieved. And not just as The Flash, but you, Barry. Your honesty. Your heart._

He listens for the song.

* * *

Barry will always feel too much. Sometimes, his friends still look at him like Joe, doing dishes. Like Iris, in the movie theater. Like his dad, across a glass chasm.

In the end, he’s alone in what he feels.

But aren’t we all?

(He runs. The Speed Force sings. _Ours. Ours. Ours.)_

(He thinks it’s going to be okay.)

When Iris comes striding out of the Mirrorverse, new power sparkling and shattering at her fingertips, there’s a whole new world she wants to show him. They walk it together, hand in hand.

“It’s incredible,” he breathes. Iris has been reshaping the Mirrorverse into a paradise, one beautiful thought at a time. 

She ducks a bashful head. “It’s just something I was doing to pass the time, after I got Singh and Kamilla out, before I was strong enough to go through. It’s nothing special.”

“Are you kidding?” Barry stops up short and turns to look at her, squeezing both her hands. He needs her to know just how special this is. How special _she_ is. “You’ve taken a cold, dead world and given it life.”

(The song rises in his head like laughter, and Barry reminds himself not to snark at the Speed Force.)

Iris is nodding quietly at the blooming meadow around them. “It was kinda lifeless, when Eva controlled it.” She grips his hand. Her power hums in tune with his own. “I don’t even know what I’m going to do with this ability.”

Barry takes a breath, savouring the awe and hope. “Oh, I have a feeling you’ll find out.”

Iris is so beautiful when she smiles.

He has the sudden, overwhelming urge to sweep her up in his arms and spin. So he does, till they’re both laughing so hard they fall to the soft earth in a tangle of irrepressible joy. He reaches out a hand to brush wildflowers out of her hair. “I love you so much.”

Still laughing with delight, she kisses him.

Then she sits up. “Do you think you can run here?” Her eyes get wider. “Do you think _I_ can?”

Barry stands, offering her his hand. “Let’s find out.”

She takes it.


End file.
